


Common

by w0rdinista (Niamh_St_George)



Series: Evangeline Trevelyan [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 11:55:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2772089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niamh_St_George/pseuds/w0rdinista
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Don't put on airs, but don't be common."  Good advice, but what does it really mean?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Common

_Don’t put on airs, but don’t be common._

Evangeline still remembers her mother’s face, blotchy and tear-streaked, as she knelt down in front of her daughter, eleven and not entirely able to understand _why_ she was being made to go away, only that she was.  It had seemed such a silly little thing at the time—tiny lights, sparking from her fingertips, no different from the sorts she’d managed in the dry dead of winter by scuffing woolen feet across the warm, thick rugs in the hall.  Except now she could make them when she wanted, dry weather, woolen feet, and thick carpeting optional.

The first part of her mother’s advice Evangeline had a solid enough grasp on.  Don’t put on airs.  Don’t treat others as if they’re beneath you.  Don’t be so very unapproachable that you become unapproachable.  Politeness, certainly, was important—it was not accurate to say proper etiquette appropriate to the situation had been drilled into Evangeline, necessarily.  But it had been the way her parents had behaved, and they, being the sorts who believed in living by example, in turn had expected that behavior of her.

More simply put, _Don’t put on airs_ often translated into, as Father’s brother, Uncle Albert, often said, _Don’t be an intolerable little shite._

An easily understood message, but then Uncle Albert wasn’t the type to mince words, and had never been.

It had been the second part of Mother’s advice that gave Evangeline particular difficulty.  Wasn’t part of the trouble the fact that she _wasn’t_ common?  Common children didn’t conjure electric sparks, after all, didn’t bring the temperature of a room down to freezing at the height of summer.  She was, insofar as the extent of her experience was concerned, entirely uncommon.

But she had been eleven, and the prospect of living anywhere but with her family had been a daunting, frightening one.  Her parents had often spoken of sending her to finishing school once she was eighteen (another concept she’d been unable to grasp at her age—if one had to attend a school to _finish_ them, how many incomplete people were there wandering about in the world?), but that, at least, had been a prospect far enough away that worrying about it would have been fruitless.  Seven years to an eleven year-old was a lifetime; this was _now._ Now she was leaving everything familiar to her—family, friends, tutors, even her horse—and the sacrifice of familiarity frightened her _._  

Evangeline hadn’t wanted to leave.  Oh, she’d known well enough that this was beyond her choosing and she would leave whether she wanted or not, but the notion of home was so deeply anchored in her breast that the very prospect of leaving had torn something open inside even endless promises of letters would not heal.

Her father had put on a far braver face than her mother had, but his sorrow, too, had been all evident.  For more than a decade Evangeline had been fluent in the language of her father’s expressions, for she spoke the same tongue.  They neither of them needed to give voice to their thoughts, and could more often than not communicate with little more than a look. A smile—or, better, a smirk.  A raised eyebrow.  An averted glance.

“Do well,” he’d said; far easier advice to parse than _Don’t be common_. But it had been his eyes, pale and grey and so very grave, saying far more than his voice would allow.  It had not been his words that made Evangeline’s throat close against tears, but rather his eyes and the lines around them, more eloquent than words.

So she’d left for the Ostwick Circle with a heavy heart and her parents’ words.

_Don’t put on airs._

_Don’t be common._

_Do well._

And in the years that followed, Evangeline followed her parents’ advice to the best of her ability.  Though her studies in the Circle were far different than what she’d known at home, she still worked diligently, still applied herself completely to whatever task assigned to her.  She did well.  She did not put on airs.  She tried not to be common, though her concept of the word changed over the years, not at all aided by the fact that she was surrounded by people every inch as uncommon as she.  In the Circle, where anyone could conjure fire or frost or sparks, where everyone’s mana manifested itself in different ways, “common” came to mean something else entirely.  She lived in a place where mana was common, where magic was common.

Consequently, she strove to be _less_ common.  Internalizing her father’s advice she do well, Evangeline plunged into her studies, pulling at her mana and developing it until her control over her mana, over the lightning and ice that lived beneath her skin, shifted with her breath.  Everyone knew any idiot could blast away a tree with a bolt of lightning—so she focused instead on tightening her control until her snow flared with threads of lightning dancing and arcing amid swirling flakes.

Over time, her understanding of the word grew, shifting and changing with age and understanding and maturity.  Now she finds herself out of her depth in a world that cannot quite decide whether it wants to revile or revel in just how uncommon she finds herself; is she truly Andraste’s Herald or had she simply been in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time?  The mark stretching across her hand offers no answers, only questions—more of them, and none of them easily answered.

Now she sits, curled upon her narrow bed, Haven cold and dark beyond her window.  Clouds blot out the stars; snow swirls, though she cannot see it.  The world is changed, and she left to find—carve out, if necessary—her place in it.  She wonders if Cassandra will ever look at her with anything less than thinly veiled suspicion.

She wonders, too, why Mother hadn’t instead simply told her all those years ago not to be boorish, not to be vulgar—to remember, above all, she was a Trevelyan, and to behave accordingly.  How differently would those words live in her memory now?

But then, Father had already said as much to her.  Do well.  Make them proud.

Don’t be common.


End file.
